Tag: Last Judgment

4 min read

Eternal Life

Understanding Predestination Properly

Msgr. Charles E. Pope

November 13, 2023 12:02 am November 13, 2023

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4 min read

Predestination is a proper biblical concept which indicates that God chose us and called us before we were ever made to be His own. It does not deny that we…

Predestination is a proper biblical concept which indicates that God chose us and called us before we were ever made to be His own. It does not deny that we freely chose Him, but it does insist that He first chose us, and thereby enabled us to choose Him.

Scripture says: “He chose us in him, before the foundation of the world, to be holy and without blemish before him. In love he destined us for adoption to himself through Jesus Christ, in accord with the favor of his will” (Eph 1:4-5; see also Rom 8:29-30).

Predestination, understood in a way that does not cancel human freedom, is thus biblical and proper. Double predestination, however, as articulated by Calvin and others that follow him is not biblical. Double predestination teaches in effect that some are destined by God from before their birth to go to heaven or hell and have no real choice. In other words, God sovereignly ordains the eternal destiny of every human being — the lost as well as the saved. Thus the damned are fated and destined to hell from before their birth.

But this is contrary to Scripture, wherein God says, for example, “I find no pleasure in the death of anyone who dies” (Ez 18:32; see also 1 Tm 2:4). So, double predestination is wrong: God does not desire, will or force anyone into hell. Only by freely choosing against heaven and the values of the kingdom of heaven does a person depart to hell — it is really their choice, God merely affirms it at the judgment.

An analogy that is sometimes used regarding predestination and double predestination is in reference to sports. In the NFL draft, certain players are chosen by certain teams. And in this sense they are predestined to play for a certain team. However, they are not doubly predestined in that they are not absolutely forced to play for this team. Though they might have to pay some financial penalties, etc., they are free simply to refuse to play for that team and insist on being available for another team. If they were legally forced to play for whatever team chose them, no matter what they thought or wished, this would be an example of double predestination. It would be akin to the Calvinist notion that people are chosen to go to heaven or hell no matter what they think or do.

All of this cancels human freedom, which the Scriptures clearly attest that we do have. Otherwise, any moral exhortation makes no sense at all.

What Calvin’s double predestination is trying to do is to preserve the sovereignty of God. But it does so at the expense of another truth, the freedom of the human person. And this is the essence of all heresy: it takes two truths that are sometimes in tension and, in order to resolve the tension, discards one truth and embraces the other. The word “heresy” is rooted in a Greek term meaning “to choose.”

Orthodoxy however holds the balance and accepts the tension. The tension is embraced in humility that accepts the fact that the tension between God’s sovereignty and our freedom is created by our own human limits in understanding.

Part of the mystery of predestination is that God lives outside of time and sees it comprehensively. God knows and sees the future and the past along with the present as one moment. But the fact that He knows something does not mean He causes or forces it. Even humanly, I might be able to see two trains moving toward each other on a track and know they are going to crash. But my knowing this does not mean I cause this.

Msgr. Charles Pope is a pastor in the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C.

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9 min read

Eternal Life

After Death, Two Judgments

Paul Thigpen

March 12, 2019 11:36 am March 12, 2019

9 min read

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9 min read

Stretching out across the altar wall of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel is Michelangelo’s magnificent fresco “The Last Judgment.” Homilies about Judgment Day are rare these days, so even Catholic visitors to the chapel may sometimes puzzle over the arresting images of the fresco — not to mention the scriptural passages that inspired the work.

In particular, Catholics often wonder why the Church teaches that human beings undergo two judgments: one at the death of the individual, and one at the end of the world. Why would divine justice require a second judgment?

To answer that question, we must understand more fully what takes place in each judgment.

The Church affirms that one day each of us will be called to account for our life, with Christ as our judge. That moment arrives at death. “It is appointed that human beings die once, and after this the judgment” (Heb 9:27).

Death puts an end to the time the individual has been granted for embracing God’s grace or rejecting it. The person’s decision for or against God is ratified, so to speak, by God himself. This first, individual judgment is known as the particular judgment. The soul of the deceased, without its body, goes to hell or to heaven, and for those who are heaven-bound the journey may involve the cleansing preparation process called purgatory (see the Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 1022).

What is left, then, for God’s justice to accomplish? Just as the time of reckoning arrives at last for the individual, so it does for the world as a whole. This future day will bring the end of the present age with what the Church calls the general judgment. On that day, as the Creed proclaims, Christ “will return in glory to judge the living and the dead” (see Mt 25:31-46; Rv 20:11-13).

Why is Christ returning to earth? To bring human history to a just conclusion, so that, as the Creed continues, “His kingdom will have no end.” Divine justice in its fullness requires that this world’s wrongs be made right. It demands a definitive end to the power of evil. So the outcome of Christ’s return is the termination of human evildoing on earth, when hell and its human allies will be utterly vanquished, and God will be “all in all” (see 1 Cor 15:23-28).

But there’s much more. At death, the body and soul of the individual are separated. At Christ’s return, before the general judgment, the souls of the dead will be reunited with the bodies they had in their life on earth (see Jn 5:28-29; 1 Cor 15:12-23,51-57). Because of this general resurrection, the bodies of the blessed will be able to take part in the joys of heaven, while the bodies of the damned will have to endure their share of the torments of hell.

Once souls and bodies are joined again, Christ, our judge, will call all people to account in the most public of judgments. “There is nothing concealed that will not be revealed, nor secret that will not be known. Therefore whatever you have said in the darkness will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered behind closed doors will be proclaimed on the housetops” (Lk 12:2-3), Jesus warned. When the Lord comes again, St. Paul declared, “He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will manifest the motives of our hearts” (1 Cor 4:5).

Why Must It Be Public?

Why must this reckoning be public? When we confess all the details of our lives before Christ and the rest of the human race, and when others do the same in our presence, we will all be forced to recognize and admit the full effects on others of what we have done and what we have failed to do. Justice requires such recognition and admission.

Yet mercy plays a role here as well. To face the truth and confess it, drinking the cup of shame all the way to its dregs before a watching world, will be a painful reckoning. But for the friends of God, it can serve as part of the purging process necessary to prepare them for heaven.

At the same time, on that day God’s friends will find it easier to forgive. As the full picture of their lives is unveiled, they will finally come to appreciate the struggles of those who offended them: the burdens they had to carry, the wounds they suffered from the sins of others and the limitations placed on them by circumstances hidden to view.

Another important consequence of this public judgment is that it will reveal to everyone the love and wisdom of God’s providence in all things. How many times in this life, when adversity tests us, are we tempted to wonder whether God really cares for us, or whether He truly knows what He’s doing? In the Last Judgment, we will be able to see all the factors in God’s determinations, all the aspects of His plan.

On that day we will be able to say to Him: “At last I understand; Your dealings with me finally make sense to me. When bad things happened, I needed faith to trust that You had not abandoned me. But now my faith has become sight.”

Justice demands that divine Providence be vindicated. The general judgment provides such vindication.

Justice and Truth

When Christ came to earth the first time, an essential aspect of His mission was revelation — to show us the truth about God, ourselves and our world. His mission is not complete, then, until the truth is fully revealed to every human being and fully acknowledged by every human being and every angel, fallen or unfallen, as well.

In this present life, throughout human history, those who have rejected God and His truth typically resist admitting their errors and deceit. But on that last day, they will have no choice but to do so.

“We shall all stand before the judgment seat of God; for it is written,” insisted St. Paul, quoting the prophet Isaiah: “‘As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bend before me, and every tongue shall give praise [or confess] to God.’ So [then] each of us shall give an account of himself [to God]” (Rom 14:10-12).

To praise God is to speak the truth about who He is, to declare His wonderful attributes. To confess (an alternate translation) means literally to agree with, to “say the same thing as,” God. Both translations point to the same reality: In the end, every one of us will have to recognize God as the Almighty Lord of all things; every one of us will have to concede the truth about God, ourselves and our world — whether we like it or not.

This, too, is a part of justice. We owe it to ourselves and others to think and say what corresponds to reality.

Consider how many people throughout history have been terribly wronged, but the wrongdoing has been covered up or denied. They wait for Judgment Day because they want the truth to be told, to be shouted from one end of the cosmos to another.

And so they should. Could God be truly just if, in the end, He allowed the terrible truth to remain hidden forever and permitted the world to maintain its malicious lies?

Those who have done wrong may go to hell adamantly refusing God’s forgiveness. But before they go to their damnation, they will be required to admit to God and to the world the truth about their wrongdoing. The general judgment must happen because truth must triumph.

The general judgment will be a day of divine wrath revealed against wickedness. On that day, the friends of God as well as those who have made themselves His enemies will have ample cause to tremble.

Nevertheless, it will also be a day of joyous celebration for those who love justice, who love truth and who love the Lord Jesus. We, too, should look to the day when the divine Judge will return to set the world aright. Longing for His appearance, we can join the ancient Christians in their fervent prayer: “Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rv 22:20).

God’s Justice

We shall know the ultimate meaning of the whole work of creation and of the entire economy of salvation and understand the marvelous ways by which [God’s] Providence led everything towards its final end. The Last Judgment will reveal that God’s justice triumphs over all the injustices committed by His creatures and that God’s love is stronger than death.

— Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 1040

The Son of Man

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit upon his glorious throne, and all the nations will be assembled before him. And he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will place the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then the king will say to those on his right, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”

— Matthew 25:31-34

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8 min read

Virtues

When facing death, hope is key for Christians

Russell Shaw

October 11, 2018 11:09 pm October 11, 2018

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8 min read

By long tradition, “last things” is a collective name given death, judgment, the resurrection of the body, heaven, hell and purgatory. The systematic study of such matters as these is…

By long tradition, “last things” is a collective name given death, judgment, the resurrection of the body, heaven, hell and purgatory. The systematic study of such matters as these is called “eschatology” in theological language. Probably, though, a true-life story is a better introduction to these profound realities than a theological discourse would be. (We’ll get to theology a little later.)

In the middle years of the last century, A.J. Ayer was one of the biggest names in British philosophy. In 1936, at the age of 26, Ayer — his first name was Alfred, but everyone called him Freddie — published “Language, Truth and Logic,” a book that made him famous. Thereafter he taught at Oxford as a professor of logic until his death in 1989.

Ayer’s book introduced the philosophical system called logical positivism into British philosophical circles. Central to it is what is called the “verifiability criterion,” according to which all statements except those of mathematics and logic are in effect meaningless nonsense.

Near-death experience

Ayer denied being an atheist or even an agnostic, but it was hard to tell the difference. In a chapter of “Language, Truth and Logic” titled “A Critique of Ethics and Theology,” the author argued that it was meaningless to say that God either did or didn’t exist.

On June 6, 1988, Ayer choked on a piece of salmon. He lost consciousness and was declared to be clinically dead for four minutes. After he was revived, the doctor asked him what his near-death experience was like.

“I saw a divine being,” the doctor reported Ayer as saying. Then, after a pause: “I’m afraid I’m going to have to revise my work.”

Sad to say, Ayer didn’t. Later he published an article acknowledging he’d had a near-death experience, but saying only that it made him a little less certain there’s no afterlife.

Facing death

If there’s a lesson here, it’s that, despite having excellent reasons to do otherwise, people often try not to think about last things. And in a way, that’s understandable. Everyone fears death. Yet in some sense the whole point of life is coming to terms with death.

Hope is central to doing that. Thus hope is inseparable from the last things. It’s a theological virtue — it comes from God and is centered on God. A working definition might be to say hope is the confidence that God will do what he says. The Letter to the Hebrews famously calls it “a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul” that “enters into the inner shrine behind the curtain [the afterlife, that is], where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf” (Heb 6:19-20).

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, treating hope more expansively, says this about it:

“When God reveals Himself and calls him, man cannot fully respond to the divine love by his own powers. He must hope that God will give him the capacity to love Him in return and to act in conformity with the commandments of charity. Hope is the confident expectation of divine blessing, and the beatific vision of God; it is also the fear of offending God’s love and of incurring punishment” (No. 2090).

The virtue of hope shouldn’t be confused with optimism, the expectation that things will turn out well in the here and now. Entertained in moderation and salted with realism, optimism is good. But there’s no justification for the simple-minded belief in “progress” that flourished in the 19th century among people who thought life was sure to get better and better with the passing of time.

That delusion died on the battlefields and in the death camps of the century that followed. As we now realize, people who seek utopia — an earthly paradise — in the triumph of an ideology or a political or economic system are bound to be disappointed. And as the history of a utopian ideology like Marxism illustrates only too well, such people sometimes can do a great deal of harm trying to make their version of utopia a reality.

Christian hope

Christian hope, by contrast, coexists with an expectation having little or no connection with utopian dreams. Starting from the awareness that although God’s kingdom is coming into being here and now, it will only be fully realized in the next life, it is directed to heaven and to our own full and perfect fulfillment there. All of which simply means that the virtue of Christian hope is essentially eschatological — above all, it’s concerned with the last things.

But it’s a mistake simply to leave it at that — something sincere Christians over the centuries have often done. The mistake lies in thinking of our present life as if it were pretty much detached from the next life. In this view, which can be found expressed in countless popular works of a devotional nature, what we do here and now earns us reward or punishment in the afterlife, but that’s about it. There’s no intrinsic link between the here and now and the there and then. Rather, the emphasis is on the discontinuity, the huge and supposedly unbridgeable gulf, between this life and the next.

To be sure, the discontinuity exists all right. For each and every human being, this life, far from blending with the next life in a seamless celestial continuum, sooner or later comes to a final, conclusive end. That great transition point is where the last things come into play.

There is, however, something more to say, something of enormous importance. It was said by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) in a hugely important section of Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.

Instead of stressing the discontinuity between this life and the next — an approach that makes the actual experience of heaven and hell more or less arbitrary — Vatican II stresses continuity. According to the council, we are preparing God’s kingdom here and now, and what we do now will in some way continue, just as the kingdom will do — forever. The last things truly are last, but last on a spectrum extending, as an old song puts it, “from here to eternity.”

Kingdom of God

To be sure, says Vatican II, we know “neither the moment of the consummation of the earth and of man nor the way the universe will be transformed.” But from divine revelation we do know that God is preparing “a new dwelling and a new earth” where “charity and its works will remain and all of creation, which God made for man, will be set free from its bondage to decay.”

This isn’t pie in the sky, the council insists. Rather than neglecting the here and now, it says, “the expectancy of a new earth should spur us on, for it is here that the body of a new human family grows, foreshadowing in some way the age which is to come. … Although we must be careful to distinguish earthy progress clearly from the increase of the kingdom of Christ, such progress is of vital concern to the kingdom of God” (No. 39).

Why? Because human effort even now is helping to build God’s kingdom. Vatican II teaches:

“When we have spread on earth the fruits of our nature and our enterprise — human dignity, brotherly communion and freedom — according to the command of the Lord and his Spirit, we will find them once again, cleansed this time from the stain of sin, illuminated and transfigured, when Christ presents to his Father an eternal and universal kingdom ‘of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace’ [Preface of Christ the King]. Here on earth the kingdom is mysteriously present; when the Lord comes, it will enter into its perfection” (Gaudium et Spes, No. 39).

Not surprisingly, no one now can grasp the full implications of this stupendous vision. Someday we will. But even now that vision should move us to understand the last things in a fresh and very different light — as key elements of what the Book of Revelation calls “new heaven and … new earth” (Rv 21:1).

As for A.J. Ayer, he died a little more than a year after his remarkable experience. It would be interesting to know what his current view of these matters would be.

Russell Shaw is an OSV contributing editor. This is the 11th part of a monthly Year of Faith series on virtues that originally appeared in Our Sunday Visitor.

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